


remake

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2014 [4]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Buffy and Faith as Daughters of Thanos, Captivity, Community: wishlist_fic, Ficlet, Gen, Hurt!Loki, Pre-Avengers (2012), Prompt Fic, Torture, Violence, sequel to a tumblr ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:59:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2777417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Loki is supposed to break, and Buffy maybe does.</p><p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2402012">Sister Self</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	remake

**Author's Note:**

> Reena_Jenkins asked for BtVS/Avengers MCU – Gamora!Buffy & Loki – continuation of [this verse](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2402012), wherein Buffy and Faith are the daughters of Thanos. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” – pre-Avengers, captive Loki.
> 
> It killed me a little, this prompt, but then I think it got better? I hope you like it.

+

She doesn’t care about Thanos’ new plaything. Not at first. He is the last in a long row of disposable toys, interesting only for as long as it will take to shatter him into a million pieces and shatter those pieces again. 

One of a hundred, a thousand. She was one of them once, ground into fine powder under scalpels and her father’s boots, but she was useful and so she prevailed. 

Beside her and her sister, few have ever been useful. 

She does not expect the green godling to be one of them. 

Not until her own ordered trips to the science ship start growing fewer and farther apart. Not until she hears her father’s slaughterers whisper of him, the green one. 

Not until Faith comes to her, one night, a slash of a smile on her face and blood caked under her nails. 

“Tough fucker,” she says, half appreciative, half angry. “Fun.”

Buffy watches her sister move about her bunk, picking up things, fiddling, as she always has. She settles, eventually, with a knife spinning between her fingers. “You should have a go at him, big sister.”

The title is an insult and has been for decades, and Buffy smiles back, hand flashing out to catch the knife out of mid-air. “I’ll leave the torture to you,” she dismisses. Blood and gore are only fun in the heat of battle. 

The cold, clinical ways of torture leave her bored. Buffy likes fire, not ice. Her words are weapons, seduction and compassion, not knives and electricity. 

“You always were too soft,” Faith chides. “Loving the enemy instead of killing them.”

Buffy, who has only vague memories of Before, shrugs, flicks the knife from one hand to the other. There was a man, once, but it matters not. Not anymore. 

Faith laughs again, steals back the blade with a twist that cuts Buffy’s hand open along the palm. “Later,” she throws over her shoulder as she leaves.

+

He is naked, endless miles of pale skin, criss-crossed by Faith’s love for sharp and pointy things, hands and feet shackled, his hair a black mess around his head. 

His eyes are closed. 

Buffy stands outside his cell for an hour, staring. 

He breathes. 

Beside that, he might as well be dead. 

+

“Faith,” Thanos says, his voice vibrating throughout the throne room. “If you cannot tame the godling, then your sister will.”

Faith snarls, springing from her perch and stomping away with a hissed comment, too low to hear. 

Buffy, sitting on the upmost step of the throne dais, watches her go. “How long, Father?” she asks, looking up at the man who made her. (Unmade her, too.)

“She has had months.” His disapproval is clear in his voice and, for a moment, Buffy allows herself a flicker of fear for her sister, for the inevitable failure and the disappointment that will follow. Disappointment is not a good thing for Father to feel.

She pushes it away. “Maybe pain isn’t the way,” she observes, carefully. 

Not all people react to violence the same way. Some break, of course, some always do. Others just scream. 

(Buffy screamed. Faith screamed, too, and that is what broke Buffy. Pain never meant anything to her, but her sister's voice ripping itself to shreds, that meant something.)

Thanos nods, waves for her to go ahead. 

Good cop, bad cop. It’s a phrase from her homeworld, but it seems fitting.

+

She watches him for a long time, after that, watches new wounds appear and heal, and the way he sneers when her sister comes to pin him open like a butterfly. 

Pride. 

That’s his most obvious flaw and the thing that fascinates her most. Pride. 

Buffy remembers pride. It kept her separate from the world around her. It washed away like everything else. 

+

“There is no shame in breaking, you know?” she asks, crouching in front of his shivering form, pressing a gentle hand to his brow. 

(Faith has her knives, Buffy has other weapons.)

He blinks green eyes open under the edge of her palm, giving her a scorching glare. “We all do, eventually.”

He sneers. “It’s not the breaking that worries me.”

She smiles. “What does?”

“The remaking.”

+

She makes a point to come after her sister leaves, to bring a bit of food, some water. A blanket, when it gets too cold on the prison level.

It’s basic psychology, really, and the magic of it is that he knows it, but it still works. His shoulders round and slump when she appears. He talks to her. 

Talking is important. 

Buffy remembers the terrible, silent years where the only voices she ever heard were her own, straining to break, and that of her sister, providing hope in the darkest nights. 

Hope is a problem. 

Buffy understands that now. It keeps people from submitting to the inevitable. 

“I have been many a thing,” he tells her, his head resting in her lap. She is untangling his hair with gentle fingers and a small knife. “But I will not be a tool.”

“It’s a bargain,” she allows, repeating what her father taught her. “Service for freedom.”

“You’re lying,” he snaps.

She yanks at his hair. He spits at her, hitting her cybernetic arm with a little splat. It slides off harmlessly, leaving a trail of damp across the metal. 

She breaks his nose. 

It doesn’t occur to her until later that he never specified what the lie was or who she was lying _to_.

+

Battle calls her away.

There is an insurgence in a far off quadrant, a mining planet that thinks it should be free of its Lord Thanos and Buffy smashes it to pieces with two squadrons and her favorite scythe, leaving rubble and ashes in her wake. 

“They will not rebel again,” she informs her father as soon as she returns, still bloody from the slaughter. There is a bitter taste at the back of her mouth. She blames it on the blood and ash covering her face and clogging her throat. 

He nods. “Very well, daughter,” he praises, waves a hand at her. She bows, leaves. 

On the way to her quarters, she runs into one of the commanders, looking a bit green around the edges. Since his natural skin tone is flaming orange, she stops. “What is it?” she demands, cranky.

“Your sister, my Lady,” he croaks. “She did not take well to being left behind. I think she might kill the prisoner. Lord Thanos will….,” probably kill him for not stopping her, nevermind that he couldn’t, even if he tried. 

Buffy sighs, growls, spins on her heel. “I will take care of it,” she announces as she rounds a corner. 

She gets Faith out of his cell with a few well-placed jabs, a little verbal sparring, and a broken arm. She knows her sister will take out her frustration on the troops, but she honestly can’t bring herself to care. The prisoner is worth a few dead soldiers. 

Little offshoots of magic have started spilling from his fingers lately, green tendrils of energy. They’re too weak to yet do any damage, but Thanos is sure the godling will be a powerful weapon, once broken. 

(Remade, Buffy thinks, because looking at him, he has been broken already, has been broken half a dozen times over. There is no shame in breaking. Perhaps he is right to worry about the remaking. She understands that now, weeks later.)

She unstrings him from the ceiling, gently lowering him to the floor. He watches with slitted eyes, panting from exertion or pain. His left arm is a red ruin, almost as bad as her own arm was before she got her prosthesis. 

But even as she props him against the wall, his tiny sparks of magic start reknitting the injury, pulling flesh and muscle, sinew and bone back together. 

She steps back, watching. Eventually, his gaze focuses on her. He takes her in, battle armor and blood stains, her weapons still strapped to her belt. Belatedly, she takes it off and hands it to a guard outside the cell, where the godling can’t get to it. 

“Out for a murder?” he quips, his voice, as always, terribly at odds with his circumstances. 

“An uprising, actually,” she corrects, scraping a bit of dried blood off her flesh arm. The flakes gently fall to the ground and mingle with the fresh blood already making the floor tacky. 

“Did you kill them all?”

She sees no point in lying. “Yes.” Men and women and children. There is nothing but dust now, on that planet.

His smirk is a twisted thing. “The apple does not fall far from the tree, does it, Daughter of Thanos?”

Buffy shrugs. “I am my father’s daughter,” she agrees. (She broke, she was remade. She was Slayer once, is Daughter now. Time moves linearly. She knows she cannot go back.)

The prisoner huffs a derisive laugh, turning his newly healed arm this way and that. “More’s the pity,” he observes, slowly rotating his wrist. His gaze rises, suddenly, fixing on her own green eyes. “Do you even remember how to be a person?”

+

He’s trying to turn her own game back on her. It’s not hard to figure that out. 

The problem is that she knows, and it still works.

+

“You know,” she tells him, one day. He has been here for almost a year. “This is getting a little ridiculous.”

She dreamed last night, of a man with dark, dark eyes, telling her he loved her and then trying to kill her with a sword. She dreamed of the sound he made as he died and the way it felt a little like dying herself. 

Like loss.

He smiled at her as he went, glad that it was him, and not her. Glad that the monster didn’t win, in the end. He won. She killed him, but he _won_ , and looking at the godling, she hates them both. 

For winning, even while they’re dying.

(Until she woke this morning, she didn’t remember what grief feels like. Damn him for making her remember.)

He smiles a flash of teeth and leans back against the wall, legs sprawled, posing like a king on his throne. “I quite agree.”

+

“Report, daughter,” Thanos demands, and Buffy feels her shoulders tense, knowing that punishment will surely follow.

“He still resists,” she says, anyway. 

She spends the next week in the labs. When she sees the prisoner again, half her hair is shaved off and the metal implants in her cheeks grate on her bones with every facial expression. 

+

He has a knife. 

Somehow, some fucking way, he has a knife and of course it had to come off of Faith, Buffy _knew_ she was being careless in her increasing frustration, but she should damn well know better and, damn him, damn them both, he has a knife. 

He broke his chains, too. Magic most likely, and now Buffy is pressed against the wall, held by glowing green power, a knife pressed to her jugular and an amused godling in her face. 

“And so,” he smirks, “the tables turn.”

“Are you going to kill me?” she asks. She isn’t afraid. She hasn’t been afraid in almost a century. 

“I’m leaving,” he answers, or maybe doesn’t answer. 

“He will hunt you,” she warns, for no reason she cares to decipher. “And he will hurt you worse than before.”

Gently, the… he is no longer a prisoner, is he?... traces a finger down her cheek implants, nail scraping along the sharp edges. She fights the urge to flinch away.

“But unlike you, who is always within reach, he will have to catch me first.”

“You think you can hide from Thanos?” the idea is laughable. She remembers being eighteen and watching as his armada fell from the sky, raining death and pain and destruction. She remembers the futility of fighting, and everything that followed after. 

There is no hiding from Thanos. Thanos is the universe. 

He shrugs, eyes keen. “I am my father’s son,” he murmurs, softly. 

The next instant he pulls back, and Buffy feels energy crackling along her skin as he gathers magic for something. Teleportation spell, probably. She grabs onto his wrist, pulls them tightly together.

The energy disperses as he twists out of her hold and then they are fighting, knives flashing and he is fire, all of him is fire, not ice.

+

When news reaches her, of his desertion on Terra, Buffy weathers Thanos rage with her sister beside her, not making a single sound as he rips into them in his fury.

It’s only later, in the privacy of her bunk, that she allows an incredulous giggle to escape. 

Hope. 

It’s a problem. 

+


End file.
